Morphology and Cultural Interpretation of Baigani Kinship Terminology
A Comparative Study with Hindi and Marathi
Keywords:
Baigani, Ethnographic, Consanguineous, Cross-cousin marriage, MorphologyAbstract
Baigani is one of the endangered languages of the Baiga community, a PVTG of Central India. In this paper, an attempt is made to explore the structure and content of kinship terms among the Baiga tribe, to identify similarities with the Indo-Aryan languages, i.e., Hindi and Marathi. Kinship terminology has been an interesting phenomenon for both Linguistics and Anthropology. Based on the ethnographic field work of the 23 Baiga villages of Pushparajgarh block of Annuppur district of Madhya Pradesh, and applying the tools and techniques of Questionnaire and semi-structured interview, observation, and transcription, the interdisciplinary paper found out some interesting results about the cultural Interpretation of the morphology of the Baigani language, which has bridged the gap between linguistics and Anthropology. The morphology of the Baiga language supported the Anthropological analysis of its classificatory and descriptive Kinship terminology, corroborating earlier research that, like Tamil Kallar and the Dravidian communities of South India, bilateral cross-cousin marriage is prevalent in the Baiga community.
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